Apocalypse’s Oracle (Part 2)

When we last left off Zero, he infiltrating the Horakthy, a hoverbarge. He noticed that its owner, Ra, has turned it into his own personal kitchen and cooking up humans. Ra kicked Zero’s ass and has left him to be cooked. As I said before, this will launch the next phase of the playtest, which explores the four tables I didn’t touch previously.

Two of these tables are for Dungeon and Hex Crawling, while the other two generate NPCs and Plot Points. For the context of this game, the Dungeon is the Horakthy and the Hexes are everything going on outside of it.

Apocalypse’s Oracle (Part 1)

I’m going to be testing out the Apocalypse Oracle (made by archon1024 from Reddit’s Solo Roleplaying group) by using There Is No Spoon, much like how I used it to test CRGE. The idea I have is a hovercraft that’s operated by only two people. They’re a vigilante group seeking to discourage people from abusing the Matrix to their whims and desires. This is set sometime before the Matrix and perhaps around the time of the There is no Spoony Veteran game.

My character creation is simple. Two points to the Matrix Stat for 3 and four to make the Katana skill a 6. Zero’s Deal will be determined by the Oracle, which I shall now go into detail talking about.

The Oracle is designed in a sleek, ergonomic layout that echoes that of katamoiran’s RPGs. There’s only four pages and two of them are needed to use and play a game. The overall intent is to minimize as much flipping through pages as possible and compared to using Mythic or CRGE, it works efficiently.

For Mythic, I had to flip a page or two to get to Actions and Descriptors, but for Apocalypse Oracle, I just need to glance to the right side of the first page. It’s card-based resolution for the complex categories had me puzzled at first, but as I noticed how it ties in the suits to mean different things on top of the rank, it started to click.

That Time I Had To Save Scientists From Rats But Got Killed By Zombies

While RPG Solo wasn’t the best at generating adventures, what got me hooked onto it was how well it kept my interest by offering an instant “copy to forum” option, which enabled me to paste into my Actual Play thread. The ease of how everything worked made me want more, and so, I made a second campaign under this system: Being an Energy Rider is Suffering. This was set during a zombie apocalypse, like the first full-fledged campaign I tried to run.

Unlike the other campaign though, this is your typical, run of the mill zombie virus infecting people. The big twist though is that zombies can be controlled. Unfortunately, these zombies are being controlled by gangs who would rather use these zombies for crimes. The only hope to stop them lies in the Sonic Arrow, a bow and arrow that has its frequencies tuned to the same kind that controls the zombies, thus overrides and even disables them.

This Sonic Arrow was made by Hope’s Peak, a scientist haven where they’re working round the clock to find a cure. The weapon is given to someone who found this zombie apocalypse thing to be the perfect excuse to try and be a hero.

I made this with a sort of time-keeping system in mind. The way it works is that I kept track of my character’s health, infection rate, food, the weather, the time remaining, and even fame. In my opinion, I liked this system a lot more than the simple hero ranking system, since there’s a lot more info to extrapolate from it.

That Time I Killed A Bunch Of Superheroes To Be #1

A year before I created this blog, I logged two campaigns on RPG Solo. It was a site that, much like RanDM Solo, would facilitate solo play by allowing the user to a built-in array of rollers, generators, and even custom tables. Back then, it was something that any solo player can just hop in and play. Nowadays, we have more options, like RanDM Solo and even AI Dungeon 2, the latter of which has had so many quality of life changes since I played with it.

However, there was a special sort of magic that came with having an entire suite of solo gaming at your fingertips and RPG Solo scratched a much-needed itch of mine. As a sort of tribute to it (it’s not dead, just dormant), I will retell the campaigns I had from this site, starting with my first: Being a Beat Rider is Suffering.

It seems funny that almost every one of my first attempts at Solo Playing always have the genre of superheroes. There was me reading with Marvel FASERIP’s system in my early days of discovering RPGs, one of the first solo RPGs I recorded for Solo RPG Voyages was a game of Capes, and now this is set in a superhero universe where heroes are ranked based off their… well, heroics.

The Voyager Sees Some Hot Dudes Making Out

I kinda wanted to make it a tradition to play Ben Lehman game for Valentines Day. However, I ended up finding games (or in one case, a gimmick to a game) that fit the theme a lot better. But now, I can say with the utmost certainty that we’re returning to Ben Lehman’s works with Hot Guys Making Out.

 The premise is a simple one: a young boy, orphaned by an ongoing civil war, is adopted into a rich family by a mysterious man. What proceeds is the boy adjusting to his new life, living under the roof of a kindly maid, a stoic butler, and the master of the house, the latter of whom he’ll fall in love with. The story has something akin to an anime or manga and is told in sequential sessions.

It’s an interesting set up and I’d like to see how this is executed. The game recommends I play either Gonsalvo, the young orphan boy, or Honoré, the mysterious master. It mostly depends on what your preferred method of narration is. Do you want more internalized thoughts or do you prefer action? I think Gonsalvo would make some interesting opportunities for roleplay, so I’ll pick him.

The next step is to pick out a Threat, the problem of the week, so to speak. However, one’s already decided for us: Maria, the maid, is jealous of Gonsalvo. The first scene is also decided for us: arriving at the manor of Honoré. After mulling over how to pull this off solo, the compromise is simple:

The game unique among the Solo RPGs I’ve played because this game uses playing cards and the game is played like a game of Hearts. … I just got the joke. You play Hearts to tell a game about love.

Tales of the Winter Alien

So, for my Memorial Day game, I decided to go back to the very first one I did: Winter. This time, with all the tools I had learned over these past 5 years, as well as the devices I was given. Now, instead of choosing from one of three lines, I’m going to make up a new line using the BOLD.

• Waylay Problem: 8 & 9, otherworldly.
• Waylay Modifier: 21, harsh.
• Waylay Solution: 5, Enemy Help.

Hmmm… This might be interesting… Alright, let’s do a five-minute freewrite.

The 100th FATAL Session

Let’s get the elephant out of the room here.

I’m going to be playing the most infamous RPG in all of history. The reason it’s so infamous is because of its excessive nudity, violence, racism, sexism, and other such dark themes, all handled with the same maturity as a fart joke. Most every reviewer that’s tackled this game have brought it up time and time again about how bad it is.

But the gameplay is seldom touched upon except if it’s related to the aforementioned themes, such as gender-specific stat boosts, jobs involving… erm… hiding the weasel, or even spells one could find better versions of in the Book of Erotic Fantasy. I heard bits and pieces of how bad the gameplay is, like how the levelling system is broken, as it gives you XP depending on what mundane activity you do. For melee-style classes like the Gladiator, it’s via how much damage you do. Get three of these classes and you can level up faster than an average character in D&D.

Part of the reason I’m doing this is to see if the RPG can be stomached by removing these dark elements. The other part? Gotta mark the 100^th session with something.

Actually, my character doesn’t start at base level 1. He’s 56 years old and began roughly around the age between 7 and 10. I then calculate the square root of the years he’s been in the job and I get my level of 7…

… Why did I need to do complex math to figure that out?

So, now I gotta quickly level up my character six times. Thankfully this just means skill points to distribute. This means I roll 7d10 to get the number of points to put in. This is on top of the skill points I get from my race (a d8 minus 1) for a grand total of 45 points.

… It turns out I gotta roll that dice 55 more times… What. The. Fu-

Can’t Catch Me, I’m The Gingerbread Man!

Now, originally I was gonna do Marvel Superheroes as my penultimate 99^th game, but then I saw that there’s a new Once Upon A Time expansion. You know what this means. Another Once Upon A Mythic Time game. Which is rather fitting because one of the very first sessions I did on this site was Once Upon A Mythic Time.

The premise this time around is Fairy Tale mashups, so instead of generic characters for our story, we’re going to be encountering established characters like Snow White, Cinderella, and Goldilocks. Same rules as before, assuming you have read them, and let’s go about this.

My character is the Gingerbread Man, his aspect is Full (I’m assuming he’s stuffed with some fondant) and his three items are beans, a beanstalk, and herbs. Herbs are an Interrupt. Our ending is…

That Time I Ended My Campaign, but Everyone STILL Died

The next four sessions I had with the Zombie Survival RPG were pretty much one, straight and narrow path to the endgame. Starting off the finale is a personalized session where it has the ulterior motive of getting a sixth member of the team from the five newly introduced NPCs.

That Time I Played Maid RPG in My Zombie RPG Campaign And Completely Changed The Story

For the next session of my zombie survival campaign, I focused on the social table and figured I would change the system to better reflect that. Enter Maid RPG, the first Japanese RPG to be translated into English. This also marked the first time I’ve done a cross-game stat change, where I take characters from one game and restat them up in another game. The only other time I tried that was when I took multiple OSR characters and plopped them into Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The game is practically a treasure trove of new content to discover and so, at one point, I’ll have to return to this game. But for now, I should get to the basics of what happened with this gameplay shift.

For one, it’s similar to Ghostbusters in that an attribute determines a D6 result. However, whereas Ghostbusters determines the number of dice you roll by the attribute you have, Maid RPG only multiplies the single dice roll you make by the attribute you have. There’s two more attributes for this, but I managed to do the exchange rather easily. Unfortunately, I lost the sheets I made, so… Yeah.